Favorite Quotes on Books and Reading

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." Oscar Wilde

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Guest Post: Author Alma Alexander

We are human beings. Passionate, fallible,
generators of wishes, dreams, regrets. We will, in the course of our lifetimes,
fall in love many times – with people, with ideas, with passionately held
beliefs. We will inevitably get our hearts broken when those people or those
ideals break under the weight of our expectations, never quite living up to
the potential which we had envisaged for
them.

That’s when the choices come, and make us face them.
The choices that arrive after we shed our illusions and look the hard truths
squarely in the eye. The choices that matter.

What if you were offered a fabulous and ideal job,
everything you wanted in every way… but you had to move three thousand miles
away to claim it, away from your friends, your family, everything you know, and
you had to go alone? Would you have the courage? Is the dream that strong?
Would you shy away from it, afraid, and then spent the rest of your life
feeling hobbled by the fact that you had this opportunity and did not take it,
that you could have grasped your dream but did not have the strength to try?
Are you afraid enough of failure to turn your back on something that is not a
guaranteed success? (IS there such a thing as a guaranteed success?)

If you were offered fame and fortune – would you
take it? Could you handle it? Would it become onerous? Would it start to be a
burden to you that you could not go out for a quick cup of coffee in the local
coffee shop because if you tried there would be a mob of adoring fans kneeling
at your feet, or following you home? Would you reject it – and then spend your
days wondering what it would have been like, to be that famous? Do you truly
covet the lifestyle of the rich and famous or do you just think you do? (Are
you sure you aren’t just a titch grateful for the chance to have a bad hair day
and that nobody would really notice or take an incriminating photograph which
would surface on the Internet and haunt you forever more?)

If you had split from the love of your life when you
were younger, but had since settled down with somebody else whom you might have
come to care for – what would you do if your first love came knocking at your
door and asking you to run away with him or her to live by some wonderful
exotic waterfall in Hawaii? When do you stop loving someone – can you stop
loving someone? Are you rejecting your heart and soul, or just temptation?

If somebody wronged you, once, and at the time you
did nothing except take it – would you jump at the chance to do it over, to pay
it back in kind, or to simply wreak an elegant revenge years later? Is there a
statute of limitations on forgiveness?

We are human beings, you and I, and we’ve had our
own choices to make along the line. Ones we were happy with, ones we regretted.
We made those choices, and carried on. And yet, it is also ever so human to
look back over our shoulder, to have second or even third thoughts, to
remember, perhaps to grieve, perhaps to sigh in gratitude. It is human to
choose. It is transcendently human to wonder – perhaps for years, perhaps
forever – what would have happened had we chosen the OTHER path when we had
come to our particular crossroads. And I think that most of us would find it
almost irresistible not to take up an option of going back and walking a road
again, coming up to the same crossroads, being given another chance.

Life doesn’t offer do-overs, and often we can only
look at other people’s choices if we want to glimpse alternatives to the ones
that we ourselves have made. Life doesn’t… but story does. And five people walked
into my mind one day, sat down in a place which I remembered vividly from my
own youth (yes, Spanish Gardens was a real place…), and demanded that I tell of
their own choices, made at the end of the world, in a place where only truth
could be told.

In their place, what would you have chosen?

And what, from where you stand right now in your own
life, are YOU going to choose next…?

A year is ending, soon. A brand new year will begin,
filled with new opportunities, new tragedies, new dreams and hopes and fears
and catastrophes and disappointments and achievements – with new love, and new
hate, and new understanding.

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Disclosures and Other Fine Print:

In accordance with new FTC guidelines for bloggers this is to inform you that some posted reviews are provided after receipt of an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of a book (hardcover, paperback or ebook). These reviews are not considered endorsements, nor do I receive any compensation (other than the opportunity to read the book) for my review. These reviews are my opinions and thoughts only. If any posted review does not provide a "thank you" to a publisher or provider or otherwise denote it is an ARC-related review then the book is from my personal TBR stash.

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